RICERCA ITALIANA     

Cultural Planning, the public and the arts: the contribution of sociological research.

Università degli Studi di Udine

Abstract

The project involves 14 researchers, about half of which are cultural sociologists; the others' competences are in general and economic sociology, urban sociology, town planning, and urban economy. They form 4 local units based at the universities of Padua, Udine, Venice and Verona. The research lays at the intersection of urban planning and the sociology of art. The basic common theme is the role of culture in local (urban, regional, community) development. The main assumption is that in post-modern, post-industrial society, with high standards of living, mobility, accessibility, education, leisure, communicational thickness and so on, there is ever more scope for cultural pursuits of all kinds; that cultural resources and products are becoming an ever more important sector of the economy; and that culture is therefore becoming also an ever more crucial factor in urban policy . There is a tidal trend, in advanced society , to regenerate aging, formerly industrial or emporial cities, by turning them into glittering, vibrant hubs of cultural activities. Since a couple of decades, the paradigm of Cultural Planning (CP) has been developed to rationalize and bring forward such experiences. The special role of the Venice Unit will be to critically revise and update the CP paradigm, originally developed in the Anglo-Saxon world, with a view to check its transferability to the Euro-Mediterranean context. A number of cases of larger cities which have recently experienced radical regeneration through culture will be studied, and some experiments in concrete deployment of the paradigm in the study area (basically the Veneto region) will be carried out.
One prerequisite of CP, as of any planning and strategic action, is the availability of data and measurements on the various phenomena involved; e second one is the principle of participation, consensus building, negotiation among the different stakeholders; a third one, the optimization of the relationship between offer and demand of cultural goods and services. This is where CP needs the services of sociology, as the science specialized in the study of social interaction and public attitudes. And this is where contemporary art, of all segments of culture, represents a specially interesting problem. On one side, since a few decades almost all cities are investing sizeable sums in the building of museums and galleries to house it, in organizing exhibitions and events to show it, and in many other ways promoting it, in the belief that it is an important resource in the marketing of the city's image as modern, young, open, innovative, trendy, even transgressive. On the other hand, contemporary art remains an elitarian affair, drawing to a very small percentage of the population; and it appears that the contemporary art system has ruled out the wider public from its horizon. This poses some social justice issues, since the public's tax money are being spent for something the large majority of the public rejects.
This is the issue prompting the group to launch the present research project. Its centrepiece is a sociological study of two layers of the public: 1) the general one (a representative statistical sample of about 1500, to be interviewed by phone, in the North-Eastern part of Italy, and 2) the public of visitors of a number (6-8) of contemporary art events in the area. This second survey will be done through face to face, on site, questionnaire interviews (n=1500).
All local units will cooperate, with slightly different roles, in the preparation, implementation and interpretation of these studies. However, some of them will also carry out more in-depth special side studies, on different aspects of contemporary art: Udine will deal with theatrical art, Padua with public art and minor, decorative arts, and Verona with the heavily mediatized "great events" of different cultural contents. <<<

Principal Investigator

Raimondo Strassoldo Di Graffembergo Università degli Studi di UDINE

Research Objectives

The general goal of the project is the redefinition and adaptation of the Cultural Planning (CP) model , that has been developed mainly in the anglo-saxon world ( UK, USA, Australia, and Canada), to the Italian context. In this effort, it will be necessary to take into account the evolution occurred in the meanwhile in the concept of strategic planning, in the complexification and interweaving of the processes of local development, the growing weight in such processes taken on by the different sectors of culture (traditional material culture, cultural industries, “high arts” and so on) in a country exceptionally endowed with “cultural ores” like Italy , and finally of the ever more crucial role played by media and communication in the promotion of cultural events.

In general, CP puts forward the following goals:

·Present itself as a true system of local development, able to warrant the cultural development of the target area, and the linkages between opportunities and constraints which are necessary in order to launch and sustain a development process;
·Present itself as a truly and effectively integrated system, able to take maximum advantage of the whole array of cultural resources (historical-traditional and contemporary, natural-environmental and artificial, hand-crafted and industrial, folkloristic and avant-garde, material and symbolic, of local or global interest, etc. ), in view of the territorial value-added and overall territorial quality.
·To point out the structural and infrastructural requisites (transport and communication networks, point services etc.) necessary to connect the resources and allow for their use;
·To emphasize the peculiarities of local identity, in order to form a clear of image of the territory and improve its recognizability.
·To take into account at the same time and in a balanced way both the cultural values for their own sake and their economic potentialities.
Even though the use of strategic planning in the cultural sphere is still limited, and the theoretical reflection on such themes is still in its infancy (Blanchini and Bloomfeld, 1996; Valentino, 2003) from the perusal of available materials it is possible to draw some procedural hints, that can help in the working out of a strategic plan for the culture sector:
1. To involve all stakeholders both in the drafting of the plan and in its implementation. The dialogue between cultural and economic actors is specially important. The cultural heritage must be presented not as a constraint but as a resource for development. On the other hand, economic development must be presented not as a threat but as a prerequisite to the availability of resources for preservation and enhancement of the cultural heritage. The task of the strategic plan is to emphasize and strengthen the shared golas, involving in their definition the main socio-cultural agents (officials of the heritage preservation agencies, representatives of the several business and professional associations, people from the world of communication, publishing, media, universities and other research institutions, opinion-makers an intellectuals, etc.), and the whole of the collectivity in its institutional representatives and its associations. The plan must also take on itself the responsibility for figuring out structures and procedures to make such participation sustainable and lasting.
2. To make the most of the new cultural richness of towns and regions; to point out ways and means to allow different cultures to show off, for instance through the organization of events, festivals, or art and theatrical schools and academies .The widening and diversification of the cultural offer, the integration of new cultures with the established one, can significantly contribute , on one side, to the growth of collective identity of towns and territories, and of their attractiveness; and, on the other side, to their ability to achieve a new centrality, and improve their standing at the national and international level.
3. To fit the valorization of cultural resources to resources of other type and to local economic activities. For instance, the development of an archeological resource must take place in harmony with the improvement of the architectonic context; the enhancement of classic or modern art must be accompanied by the production of events (exhibitions, fairs, festivals etc.); the production of events must be correlated with the output of new products in the sphere of communication and with the offer of new tourist packages, etc.
4. To coordinate with other sectoral plans. Strategies of intervention in the cultural sector, the deployment or enhancement of new or old infrastructures cannot be defined independently from the strategies implemented on contiguous sectors, like tourism or communication networks;
5. Identify viable pathways and set up an agenda of things to be done. The strategic plan, in other words, must both commit itself to the identification of middle- and long-term development lines, and define the criteria for the hierachization and timing of interventions (priorities).
6. to supply criteria and methods that can help decision-makers in their choices. One of the ways in which the strategic plan can help is the presence of a thesaurus of “best practices” and the guidelines for its continuous updating. Among the best practices, an important one is the systematic use of techniques for listening to the demand, i. e. sociological survey on the different publics.

Specific aims can be spelled out as follows:
·Redefinition of a methodological framework for CP that would take into account the peculiarities of the Italian situation and, within it, of the Northeastern region. Outlining of an CP intervention methodology after a necessary adaptation to the specificity of urban sites adopting such tools. Indication of guidelines useful to the readying of cultural strategic plans for local development.
·Integration of negotiation theory in the theory of CP and of strategic planning.
·Highlighting and experimenting the specific contribution of sociological theoretical and methodological approaches in the analysis, in view of local development, of the processes by which cultural demand and supply are shaped.
·Deployment of GIS and WebGIS technologies in order to test methodological pathways in the analysis of spatial-territorial interdependencies between demand and supply of cultural resources.
8.Definition of the role of some selected segments of culture
A. contemporary art in the “high” and “narrow” meaning of the word, i. e. “avant-garde art” of the last century and “post-modern” arts; B. minor and decorative arts; C. theatre and D. sport shows) in the overall cultural offer, and their relationships with the demand issuing from the public. <<<

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

The present project is rooted in the theory of Cultural Planning (CP) and thus at the intersection of planning theory and sociology of culture (of cultural and communicative processes, in the Italian phrase).

1. PLANNING
Planning is classically meant as a mode of organized action which was born in the military and the town-planning realms and then spread, around the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, to the economy and then to all sectors of State intervention: infrastructures, territory, school, health, transport, social services, etc. The practice has taken on monstrous features in totalitarian regimes; but it has been widely adopted also in liberal- and social-democratic societies (Mannheim 1950). To plan essentially means to employ rational-scientific methods in political-administrative activities: definition of problems to be solved and goals to be reached; identifications of obstacles and constraints; identification of ways and means (procedures, resources, competencies, subjects etc.) to accomplish the goals; recursive control of congruence between means and ends; etc. As a rule, planning includes a time dimension ( scheduling, timing, chronograms etc.) and a spatial one (intervention areas). Planning gets all the more necessary as the world (system) becomes more complex, in terms of multiplicity and linkages between all the elements (variables) involved. In this situation, it is all the more imperative for planning to be holistic (comprehensive), i.e. to take into account all relevant variables; and to be relational (see the third point below). Also, planning becomes all the more necessary with the growing cruciality of the efficiency principle, i. e. the optimal use of always relatively scarce resources. Obviously the planning method does not concern only the State and other public administrations, but every actor: from large business corporations to single families and individuals. In the last century, around planning and its kin ( programming, operational research etc.) an enormous body of scientific- disciplinary complexes have grown , often of great formal and mathematical sophistication; and a correspondingly huge bibliography (McLoughlin 1969; Chadwick 1971; Hall 1976, 1996; Strassoldo 1977; Allmendiger, Trewor-Jones 2001).

2. CULTURE

Culture is one of the wider-ranging and central concepts in social and human sciences, and one with the vaguer contours. Definition proposal have been innumerable (Miller 1987; Featherstone 1991; Crespi 1996; Crane 1997; Griswold 1997; Colombo, Eugeni 2001). In general , culture is anything connected with human thought, action and communication (including meanings, opinions, feelings, memories, etc.) as well as all the physical objects in which they are materialized. Cultural phenomena can be classified along many theoretical and typological schemes. One of the simpler ones distinguishes three categories of cultural elements: a) “High culture”, formally handed down by educational institutions (e.g. schools) and comprising history, science, literature, fine arts and such; b) material culture, i. e. artifacts in which human actions are ambodied and made visible: tools and weapons, dress and housing, architectures and monuments, furnishing and decorations, symbols and signs, rituals and feasts, cooking, implements, machines, industrial plants and so on.; c) social culture, i e. patterns of behaviour (values, norms, roles etc.) in any field: from language to production, from communication to reproduction, from religion to leisure, from habits to play, etc. (see e.g. Bianchini and Ghilardi, 1997).

3. CULTURAL PLANNING

Cultural planning (CP) is essentially the deployment of the planning approach (and thus of the scientific-rational outlook) to the organization and management of cultural phenomena; or, more pointedly, “the strategic use of cultural resources for the development of cities and communities” (Mercer 1991, 1996; McNolty 1991, 1992; Bianchini, Parkinson 1993; Grogan, Mercer, Engwicht 1995).
The main features of CP, setting it apart from kindred paradigms, and also justifying the use of the original English expression in Italian discourse, are three.

3.1. Emphasis on socio-economic-territorial development.
The first specificity is the focus on the implications, or even goals, of cultural activities on socio-economic-territorial development, to the advantage of local communities. Cultural activities (Argano et al. 2005; Grossi, Debba 1998; Federculture 2002) are considered not only for their benefits on the immaterial and personal cultural endowment of people (users, visitors, spectators etc.) but also for their effects on the growth of tourist flows and the related services, on the attraction of new residents, of improvement of the stock of facilities, infrastructures, containers, and general improvement of the urban quality. Urban regeneration policies nowadays are bound to valorize of the public spaces and culture that is elaborated, communicated and expressed (Featherstone 1994; Zukin 1995; Lofland 1998; Torres, 2003 e 2004; Bovone 1997, Bovone et al. 2002).
CP is rooted in the view that in post-industrial (post-modern) society, marked by high living standards, high income, a tertiary- and quaternary economy with a high intellectual and knowledge content, high mobility and ample leisure time, cultural activities get ever more relevant in the overall social life, and thus are an ever more important factor also in urban policies (urban marketing) (Magnaghi 1990, 2000)..
CP expresses, historically, the spreading of the competencies of planning practitioners (engineers, architects, economists) from the physical-material- spatial dimension (buildings, infrastructures) to the immaterial-symbolic dimension of culture.
CP deals with all cultural forms: the architectural and environmental heritage; landscape; historical relics; “fine arts” (painting, sculpture, theatre, dancing, literature, with all their evolutions, derivations, and hybridizations); traditional handicrafts; cultural industry; industrial design; fashion; traditional or reinvented folklore; ethnic cultures , borne by the new immigrant minorities; “tribal” subcultures of the metropolitan youth groups; play, sport and leisure activities; popular festivals, traditions, rites; eating practices and tastes and the related agricultural peculiar practices and crops; local special customs and habits, etc.
CP distinguishes cultural resources according to their content, container, and their location in space and time. As to time, it distinguishes between a diachronic approach, emphasizing goods and activities that are rooted in history, and a synchronic one, which empasizes the cross-section interaction among diverse activities and goods; and thus the “segnic thickness”, communications among cultural forms, and innovation in terms of contents, of spaces, of techniques, of agents, etc. (Lovering 1995; Kao, 1996; Landey, 2000; Everitt, 1997; Magnaghi, 2000; Bloomfield and Binachini, 2004)

3.2. Identity goals
The second specificity if the emphasis on psycho-social benefits, in terms of identity building, of the valorization of cultural activities, both individual and collective. In an age when powerful forces are at work, pressing for omologation (standardization, “McDonaldization”) o cultures across the planet, there is a growing need to defend and promote local diversities: by reaction, globalization breeds new kinds of localism (Glocalism) (Strassoldo, Tessarin 1992; Strassoldo 1992) Cultural resources help in bestowing identity to individuals, and at the same time citizens, actively living the cultural and symbolic heritage of the community, shape their identity on the latter (identification). Between the individual and communitarian identity a virtuous interactive relationship is established (Ghilardi 1999)

3.3. Participatory and negotiating character
The third specificity is the emphasis on the participatory, negotiating, flexible, listening, promoting and coordinating (bottom up) character of CP, rather than centralistic, directive, techno-bureaucratic (top-down) character of older planning. This feature is in tune with the concept of governance, i e. the steering of public affairs through influence rather than authority, persuasion rather than prescription (Innes 1995; Healey 1997; Mayo 2000; Innes, Booher 2001; Porrello 2004, 2006). This feature is germane to the liberal-democratic system, aiming at fostering and stirring grass-root initiatives, coming from civil society, in the cultural field as well as in any other. It is also typical of the complexity, pluralism, and “liquidity” of post.modern society. But it also echoes the historical experience of the USA, where up until rather recent times cultural activities were mostly left to private initiative. CP lends an attentive ear to the requests, suggestions, values, interests, of a variety of actors (individual citizens, committees, associations, institutions with various degrees of public standing). Citizens are not considered as passive targets (users, consumers) of activities organized by political authorities, but as stakeholders, i.e. parties, bearers of legitimate interests (Strasser and Titus, 1987; Pruit, 1994).
In this framework, particular importance accrues on the professional skills of the specialists in the study of needs, values, views, interests, tastes, attitudes of the public: i. e. the sociologists.
In many realms of modern society listening to the public, by means of sociological research techniques, is an established practice: so e.g. in politics, through surveys, and in business, through market research. The practice is much less usual in the artistic-cultural realm where an enlightenment-like attitude has long obtained, according to which cultural values are worked out by intellectual elites, by technical experts and moral authorities, and then proposed and often imposed top-down to the general public (Bourdieu 1979; Mucci, Tazzi 1982; Davidson Schuster 1991; Zolberg 1994; Rochlitz 1994; Hood 1995; Bertasio 1997; Vettese 1997; Moulin 1999; Buzzi 2002; Quemin 2002; Michaud 2003; Bertasio; Tessarolo, Verdi, Zorino 2005; Strassoldo 2006). Supply prevails on demand. The study of the public’s preferences , but also of its responses to the initiatives of the elites, is especially wanting in the field of the” fine arts”. Tellingly, it has emerged with some force in the last third of the past century, in the USA, at the time of the substantial inroad of public (federal) administration in this field; and the ensuing claim of taxpayers for control of the social impact and of the cost/benefit ratio of public expenses in high culture (Baumol, Bowen 1966; Girard, Nijkamp 1999; Frey 2003)..

4. CONCLUSION
CP so far has spread primarily in the Anglo-saxon world (UK, USA, Canada, Australia), at the time of the great programs for the regeneration of major declining industrial cities (e. g. Glasgow, Birmingham etc.) (Nystrom 1999; Bell e Jayme 2000; Trigilia 2005). The general goal of the proposed research project it to adapt the CP model to the Italian context, taking into account the evolution occurred in the meantime in the interpretation of local development processes and of the role of strategic planning, and of the main experiences of culture-based urban regeneration which have taken place in Mediterranean Europe (Italy, France and Spain) (Materasso, Halls 1996; Santagata 2001). Peculiar features of the present project are: 1) the integration of strategic planning, CP and negotiation theory Raiffa 1982; Fisher, Ury 1991; Neale, Bazerman 1991; Tellia 2000; Melchior 2004); 2) the focus on planning of cultural activities in the field of visual arts, theatre (Gallina 2001; Pozzi, Valli 2003) and of aestheticized sports events, and the role of the media in their spectacularization (Sanguanini 1998, 2000a, 2000b, 2003); 3) the role of sociological research in the analysis of the relationships between demand and supply (the public and the managers) in the cultural field, and in promoting a better fit between the two. <<<